About this episode
From public service to private wealth—Joe Brienza shares his journey to becoming a Forbes and Barron’s top-ranked financial advisor.
In a new episode of Head to Head, Joe Brienza (Managing Director, Clarity Advisors, UBS Private Wealth Management) joins Co-Heads of Distribution Kirsten Pickens and Ryan Robertson to discuss the adrenaline rush of a new client, what it means to have competition in your blood and his path from working with presidents and political consultants to helping families build wealth and plan for the future.
“I wanted to come in here and do something where at least at nights I can say, “you know what, I’m making a positive impact to someone, not just enriching my W2.” And that was really much more important to me at the beginning—just to do something that was really important. That was how I ended up getting into this business.”—Joe Brienza
About Joe Brienza
Managing Director Joe Brienza is a Private Wealth Advisor who serves generations of ultra-high-net-worth families. His team, Clarity Advisors, works closely with clients to help deliver an array of wealth solutions including family meeting planning and facilitation, estate planning, multigenerational wealth transfer guidance and integrated investment planning. Joe has extensive experience advising families on bespoke philanthropic strategies and charitable vehicles including charitable trusts, private and public foundations and donor-advised funds.
Transcript excerpt:
Kirsten Pickens:
Welcome to Head to Head, a podcast by FS Investments where we get personal with the people of financial services. I’m Kirsten Pickens.
Ryan Robertson (00:30):
And I’m Ryan Robertson. We are the Co-heads of Distribution at FS Investments.
Kirsten Pickens (00:35):
Today we’re excited to welcome Joe Brienza, Managing Director at Clarity Advisors UBS Private Wealth Management.
Ryan Robertson (00:43):
From public service to private wealth, Joe Brienza shares his journey to becoming a Forbes and Baron’s top ranked financial advisor. So let’s get started. We’re excited for you to hear our conversation today. So Joe, thank you so much for being on Head to Head. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have you. Let’s start, if you don’t mind, you’ve had a really sort of unique career path to financial services. You started in public service and then ultimately have moved into this business. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started in public service and then ultimately how you ended up in our business?
Joe Brienza (01:36):
Yeah, so I went to school out east, I went to undergraduate in St. Mary’s in Maryland and then graduate school at Johns Hopkins. And it was very interesting because when I had an internship to work for Mary Madeline at the time, so at the time I didn’t know who she was and most people wouldn’t have known who she was now. History has that tendency. Mary is very interesting lady. So I show up to work for the first day and it was in probably a 40,000 square foot building and it was the beginning of the 92 campaign, so this would’ve been in 90 and there was no staff and there was no walls. Mary had a card table set up. I walked in and she looked at me and goes, “well, what are you doing here”, in so many colorful languages. And I said, I understand you need some help.
She just looked at me and goes, “so you think you can help me?” I was pretty young. I was like 21 or 22 and I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that, so I just sort of smiled. So that sort of led to, I worked for Mary and on the team and then it sort of evolved into supporting and working for the president. And so, this would’ve been ‘41. And so that was really basically through the ‘92 campaign. And it was one of those just fantastic, amazing experiences. And then after the campaign, I ended up going over with Haley Barber to the Republican National Committee. I worked there for probably five years. And that was a really interesting dynamic because you met a really lot of interesting people. And that’s sort of when I started realizing politics is really interesting and working on Capitol Hill was really fun, but you kept running into a lot of very wealthy people and they had access to power and it was like, but if you work for an elected official, the challenge is you’re always beholden to who’s in power and whether they get elected or not elected.
